The lead leader of The Economist on 4 June carried a headline that, twenty years ago, would have been thought editorially impossible: "How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism." The piece names three figures the magazine considers the new face of the European and American left: Zack Polanski, the 40-something leader of the UK Green Party; Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected mayor of New York City; and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the 70-year-old French left-populist now contesting his fourth presidential bid on the strength of Gen-Z support.

For The Economist to publish a leader using the words "fight back" against any political tendency is itself news. The magazine prefers to advise, to warn, to invite reconsideration. "Fight back" is closer to the language of trench warfare. And it appears, on the magazine's own analysis, that this is what is required, because the figures it names share a programme: price controls, wealth taxation, and what the leader calls "an extensive series of nationalizations." The magazine attributes their rise in part to outrage over Gaza. It does not attribute it, but might equally have done, to two decades of housing policy that has priced an entire generation out of asset ownership.

This is the awkward bit for those of us in Australia who watched the budget pass through the House of Representatives last week with a 30 per cent capital gains tax bundled into the same bill as a curtailment of negative gearing. Senator Andrew Bragg, in his press conference of 4 June, called the package "a sledgehammer across the economy" and noted that the Treasurer's own estimates show 35,000 fewer houses will be built as a result. Bragg also pointed out — and this is the bit Australian Labor partisans have not yet absorbed — that the Government has "given the Treasurer god-like powers" under the legislation.

The Economist's leader is not, of course, written about Australia. It is written about a generation of voters in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, who have looked at the housing market they cannot enter, the wage growth they have not received, and the climate forecast they have inherited, and concluded that the existing economic settlement is not working for them. The magazine's anxiety is that the response — wealth taxes, nationalisation, price controls — is the response that produced the British 1970s, the Argentine 2010s, and the Venezuelan present.

The Australian Labor government is, on the surface, not pursuing nationalisation. It is pursuing what its Treasurer prefers to call a fairer tax settlement, which on inspection happens to mean a 30 per cent capital gains tax, the curtailment of negative gearing, and discretionary powers vested in the Treasurer to amend the system as he sees fit. The pattern The Economist identifies among Gen-Z socialists abroad — concentrated executive discretion, redistributive tax raised on the politics of envy, and a programme presented as moral rather than economic — is the pattern unfolding in Canberra in slightly more polite English.

Bragg's better question, also from 4 June, is the one Australian voters should put to their MPs over the next eight weeks: "Why are we subsidising 51,000 non-Australians, in an Australian home buyer scheme?" Senate estimates the previous evening revealed that, under the 5 per cent home guarantee scheme expanded by the Government in 2023 to include permanent residents, 51,000 guarantees have been issued to non-citizens. Only one has defaulted. Whatever one's view of the immigration programme, this is the kind of policy detail that, when it surfaces, produces precisely the political moment The Economist's leader writers fear: a young Australian voter who cannot get a deposit together discovering that the Commonwealth has guaranteed deposits for 51,000 people who are not yet citizens.

The Coalition will not, by itself, win this argument by repeating the words "toxic taxes." It will win it, if it wins it at all, by becoming the party that explains what The Economist's leader is for — fighting back — and what it is against. The 250,000-homes-a-year supply target Bragg sketched on 4 June is one answer. It is not yet a campaign. It will need to become one.